Maybe I'd still like the space station

Oh me

Oh my

Oh wonder

Meanwhile, I'm defintely getting more jaded. When I read this my first thought was "I saw this episode when it was about Nike". I'm thinking that there is a downside to having been exposed to countless pleas for help by the third world for as long as I can remember.

In the interest of this not turning into a mere warehouse of links and embedded video, I thought I might babble on a bit about some stuff.

Can you dig it?

I have decided that I am going to do my best to take a stand against the killing of time.

Since about 18 months ago I've noticed that my perception of the passage of time has ratcheted up a rather noticable notch. It's not the first time, certainly, and I look back with increasing fondness on a memory of me at a single digit age being told by my mum that the Carp Fair wouldn't be on for a month. What awe I felt at that stretch of time.

But now I find that a month is comperable to how I used to see a week, a week is more akin to a day and a day is more akin to three hours or so.

Like a lot of things, it's alarming but what can one do against time? Nothing much, but what can you do about your perception of its passing? Bore yourself to tears and it will slow. Snort cocaine off of Scarlett Johannson's left buttock while listening to a duet between Thom York, Bjork and a panda being played live in the auditorium of your personal space station and it will most likely speed up a bit.

Most likely.

But nobody wants to live a stretched out bit of boredom and I think it would be just an exercise in meaningless distraction to fill my time with as much entertainment as possible so as to send myself (perceptually) hurtling towards my emerald studded space coffin (complete with space servants to join me in the afterlife). Okay, fair enough, this leads to a more rewarding and tantalizing path then picking a spot on the spectrum of hedonism. Being productive in a personally rewarding fashion. Writing always "steadies time" for me and this is certainly one of the reasons I love it. But until I'm self supporting, I need to work a day job.

Now we're really heading into first world problem territory. Brace yourselves.

I...I want my day job to be something I want to do and which contributes more to my life than a paycheque. I want to stop pressing the mental fast forward button on stretches of time in my day which do not include physical pain or recovery from illness. I want to stop feeling like I'm mortgaging about 2/3 of my waking life to sustain myself and be able to enjoy the other 1/3. Essentially, I want to lose the prefix.

Just typing that last bit sent a deluge of imagery roaring through my head. Oh but Mr. Brackenbury, there are so many people so much worse off than you. There are those starving people, those diseased people, those abused working people, those people on the wrong end of a state sponsored genocide, those people who are forced at gunpoint to commit incest, those people who come to a website they regularly frequent for something interesting or pleasant and find neither and who could forget those tired, swollen bellied children with the flies crawling all over their eyeballs like octegenarian golfers parading around the 9th green to figure out the angle of their putt - those kids which were just segwayed to by TV's own Dr. Frasier Crane, Kelsey Grammar, while you're just trying to be one of those children who gets to eat cereal and watch cartoons before going to school.

I think this is how generally well meaning people end up hating the poor just as they can wind up resenting a television show or a band - overplay. Is...is this an awful portent of my eventual transformation into a sharp fanged, utterly merciless bastard with no concern for anybody but himself? I certainly hope it's just a phase I'll outgrow by the next clothing or musical style I find myself enjoying.

Right then, to sum up, three new goals to achieve by years end (and preferably before).

• Support myself with a job I enjoy and that is directly related to film.
• Forgive those less fortunate for being so*.
• Find and maintain a satisfactory perception of the passage of time.

Ok, ready SET GO!

(This rambling essay/manifesto was brought to you by the increasingly mind-gumming illness which I am losing the war to).

*This is, of course, worded just a little tongue-in-cheek.